Introduction

Music is at the root of of the lives of the majority of people. Mostly as a point of leisure and a means of escape from the stress of the real world. Breaking down todays popular songs gives insight into the musical components that make up these songs of escape for the listerns of Spotify. This projects develves into what makes a song popular and what features are the features of a popular song. Music listened is a form of self-expression and looking into popular in specific offers a lot of insight into a culture. Analyzing data sets found for the top 100 songs on Spotify from 2017 and 2018 each song is broken into several different musical components. These include: danceability – how danceable a song is based on combination of musical elements such as tempo, rhythym stability, beat strength, and regularity 0 is least danceable, and 1 is most danceable. energy – measure of intensity and activity, 1 is fast, loud and noisy key – the estimated key of the track, if no key detected the value is -1 loudness – how loud a track is in decibels, range from -60 to 0 db mode – indicate the type of scale from which the melodic content derived, major is 1 and minor is 0 speechiness – measure of presence of spoken words in track, from 0 to 1 0.66 and above is all spoken words, 0.33-0.66 is music and speech, and below 0.33 is music accousticness – a confidence measure of whether a track is acoustic, from 0 to 1. instrumental – measure of vocals, closer to 1, means less vocal content liveness – detects the presence of an audience in the recording. Higher liveness values represent an increased probability of a live recording. a value above 0.8 provides strong likelihood that the track is live. tempo – measure of beats per minute(BPM), speed or pace of song

Summary Information

In 2017, Pop was/were the most popular genre(s), and Ed Sheeran, The Chainsmokers was/were the most popular artist(s). The most danceable song(s) was/were Bad and Boujee (feat. Lil Uzi Vert), Fake Love. The average danceability of the top 100 songs in 2017 was 0.69682. The average danceability of the most popular genre of the top 100 songs of 2017 was 0.6886562. In 2018, Hip-Hop/Rap was/were the most popular genre(s), and Post Malone, XXXTENTACION was/were the most popular artist(s). The most danceable song(s) was/were Yes Indeed. The average danceability of the top 100 songs in 2018 was 0.71646. The average danceability of the most popular genre of the top 100 songs of 2018 was 0.7590667.

Table: Genres and their Key Musical Attributes

The below table provides a comparison of key musical features as organized by genre (ranked from most to least common genre over the past two years). Because genre is often differentiated by the “feel” and “style” of the track (e.g. Valence, Danceability, etc.) rather than the “hard features” (e.g. Loudness, Liveness, etc.), the table below features the average of some of the key features that are strongly related to the feel of a genre.

Unsurprisingly, the most common genres such as pop or dance/electronic show relatively average mean values (close to 0.5). This can be attributed to the wide variety of songs that are categorized into the loosely-defined genres – for example, pop as a genre is a mixing pot that contains many unique artists and styles that don’t necessarily fit within solely one genre, and are thus labeled as pop because it shares some features with other songs in the category. This is further evidenced by the fact that out of 200 top songs, 5 categories compose a majority of the top charts.

Genre Example Number Valence (avg) Tempo (avg) Danceability (avg) Energy (avg)
Pop Shape of You – by Ed Sheeran 59 0.50 118.77 0.67 0.64
Hip-Hop/Rap I’m the One – by DJ Khaled 46 0.44 121.39 0.75 0.61
Dance/Electronic Something Just Like This – by The Chainsmokers 36 0.48 117.21 0.68 0.70
Latin Pop Despacito - Remix – by Luis Fonsi 22 0.68 112.69 0.74 0.78
R&B/Soul Starboy – by The Weeknd 9 0.40 130.75 0.71 0.56
Alternative Bad Things (with Camila Cabello) – by Machine Gun Kelly 5 0.42 125.02 0.64 0.68
Dance Pop Friends (with BloodPopŒ¬) – by Justin Bieber 4 0.55 109.02 0.76 0.68
Emo rap SAD! – by XXXTENTACION 4 0.55 116.01 0.80 0.56
Funk That’s What I Like – by Bruno Mars 3 0.81 115.38 0.79 0.74
Reggaeton Despacito (Featuring Daddy Yankee) – by Luis Fonsi 3 0.77 145.95 0.78 0.65
Synth-pop Thunder – by Imagine Dragons 2 0.36 140.84 0.65 0.62
Contemporary Country Malibu – by Miley Cyrus 1 0.34 139.93 0.57 0.78
Country Body Like A Back Road – by Sam Hunt 1 0.63 98.96 0.73 0.47
Country Pop Meant to Be (feat. Florida Georgia Line) – by Bebe Rexha 1 0.59 154.00 0.64 0.77
Future-bass Scared to Be Lonely – by Martin Garrix 1 0.20 137.97 0.58 0.54
Rap 1-800-273-8255 – by Logic 1 0.39 100.02 0.63 0.57
Rock I Donäó»t Wanna Live Forever (Fifty Shades Darker) - From “Fifty Shades Darker (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)” – by ZAYN 1 0.09 117.97 0.74 0.45
Tropical House Mama – by Jonas Blue 1 0.56 104.03 0.75 0.79

Top Artists Chart

This chart highlights the relationship between year and artist popularity, specifically focussing on the change in popular media over the course of of one year, looking at 2017 and 2018’s top artists. Combining the two years together we get insight into which artists are consistently topping the charts every year, popular newcomers, and potential one hit wonders. Seeing the popular artists over these years allows for further analysis to break apart their songs and figure out what combination of music features made their songs most successful in these years. It also allows viewers to see if a particular artist had more popular songs in a given year and provide the question to look further into the difference between their songs from each year to explain the difference.

Influence of Danceability on Loudness